Attribution: Rotograph Company, New York City (publisher), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, hands it off to the keeper for his rant on college fraternities.
The “frats” have recently been in the news for making Cornell University look like a juvenile fun-house parking lot complete with playpens for the big boy-babies who resist potty training.
The fact that fraternities are sanctioned by those institutions structured to lead civilization out of the intellectual darkness is an aberration comparable to tolerating, even encouraging termites in library foundations and rodents in their attics.
Perhaps it was the sequence of events in his personal life that now finds the keeper bad-mouthing the frat structure. First he was sent off for a year to kill or be killed by strangers from a foreign land. After surviving such excitement as “incoming” and night patrols, the keeper then came back to attend the University of Wisconsin under the GI bill. An invitation to be a “frat boy” had the ring of a cuckoo bird call, and the absurd prospect of hazing before “pledging” sent the keeper out into the fraternity-free fresh air.
There are members of the keeper’s clan who processed through college fraternity systems and who seem none the worse for it. The keeper is happy about that but it does not change his firm belief that there are some things, actually many things, that support and even encourage young men to act like assholes and the college fraternity system is one of them.
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